“steps” is composed exclusively from field recordings made at the Dachau Concentration Camp memorial site.

—

What is it that we’re hearing? Is it the wind? Is it the sea? Is it the crackle of a burning fire? Where are we? A great sense of loneliness pervades the quiet setting which we cannot quite make out. And then suddenly living creatures enter the sonic scene. Birds and people, their voices and their steps. They seem to be walking, walking past us, towards a destination we do not know. We cannot understand in what language or languages they are speaking – or can we? It is hard to make out, because everything they say is strangely muffled, although they are not speaking in a low voice. Everything we hear feels either too loud or too quiet, too close or too distant. As if some shock had happened to our hearing before we started listening to this album. Like a bomb exploding in close proximity to our ears. Or something so unimaginably terrible that it bent the acoustic space in the place from which these sounds come through to us. This is how the album “steps” begins.

The album “steps” is composed exclusively from field recordings made at the Dachau Concentration Camp memorial site. It is not possible to represent the horrors of concentration camps in music, and – a lesson learned from the many failures in the history of “industrial music” – the attempt to do so will inevitably result in trivialising kitsch, at best. Therefore, the album “steps” does not claim to be an album “about” a concentration camp, it is an album about a memorial site. Like the modern-day classic on the subject, “Gurs. Drancy. Gare de Bobigny. Auschwitz. Birkenau. Chelmo-Kulmhof. Majdaneck. Sobibor. Treblinka” by Stéphane Garin & Sylvestre Gobart (2011), “steps” goes to show to what extent contextual information about the sonic subject matter of a piece influences our listening. This artistic strategy can also be read in political terms: Only if we know the history behind these sounds – and the history of the place where they were recorded – are we able to make sense of the present.

For part 2, EMERGE invited sound artists from all over Europe to give their characteristic processing to the original audio field recordings. The resulting audio fragments are fed into the performance, symbolising a peaceful, solidary encounter of cultures – in deliberate contrast to the fact that people from many European countries were brought together in the Dachau concentration camp by utmost force.

For their release # 168, Northern Bavaria based experimental legends Doc Wör Mirran have invited their longtime transatlantic friend and repeated co-conspirator Adrian Gormley as well as prolific experimental underground friends and colleagues Frans de Waard and Sascha Stadlmeier. While the core Doc Wör Mirran line-up fulfills the rather typical roles of a band, with instruments such as guitars, percussion, and synthesisers, Stadlmeier and de Waard add lots of textural details using taped and digital samples, sound effects, radio noises, and heavily processed voice. However, throughout the best part of the release, it is Gormley’s saxophone that guides us on our way through their collective soundscape.

At times lyrical, at times plaintive, sometimes melodic, sometimes weaving itself into the overall tapestry of sounds, the saxophone proves itself capable of bridging the gap between a melody-based and the more sound-based musical approach followed by most of the players here. Some of the best moments of this three-part album that was culled from one single live session happen when the saxophone interplays with percussive noises from plastic bottles and all sorts of other sounding devices, as well as spaced-out guitars and a theremin. The album gets darker and denser from part to part, ending up as a sort of industrial lounge jazz for a David Lynch movie.